Canadian Sport Psychologist, Peter Jensen, wrote Igniting the Third Factor. It’s a great contribution to Canadian sport that offers plenty of lessons for those in business and parents working with colleagues and kids trying to help them improve. Jensen observes that there’s a third factor beyond nature and nurture that influences outcomes amongst us. Yes, some are born with brilliance in their biology. Others, have the luck of the draw when it comes to the influences under which they grow up. Opportunities and other advantages can show up in either our nature or how we’re nurtured. However, Jensen asserts that a key element of success in others is the role they take in their own development. It’s like the quote from a recent PragerU Stories of Us episode where the protagonist observes, “We’re born looking like our parents, but we die looking like our decisions.” Who we ultimately become is largely crafted by the choices we make.
Igniting the Third Factor is about helping others help themselves. It’s about working with others to encourage them to take ownership of their own future. Jensen notes, “I use the term as a way of talking about self-direction and the development of self-awareness and self-responsibility in the people we coach and manage.” Independent of what we’re born with or what environment we grow up, we make personal choices. It’s these choices that drive us to our destination. “The Third Factor is the important role that an individual plays in his or her own ‘becoming.’” Jensen suggests “The Third Factor is the key to high performance because it requires engaging the will and becoming increasingly more self-responsible and aware.” We can’t be pushed or pulled to the podium. At some point we need to choose where we want to go to influence our flow. The ignition of our third factor can follow frustration. We may need to feel failure, disappointment, or rock bottom before we realize that we have power over our present. Only once we realize there’s a gap between where we are and where we want to be do we become alive to the idea that there may be things we can do to bridge this gap.
Igniting the Third Factor is about developing thirst. Those that are thirsty will look for water on their own. They will proact. Good coaches realize that they can lead a horse to water, but they can’t make it drink. Ultimately, discipline is driven by desire. Desire is what inspires and commits an individual to be willing to perspire. Great coaches, leaders, and parents care about helping others get better. This developmental bias is at the heart of igniting the third factor in others. These roles are more about building competence, commitment, and capacity in others than in supervising and directing. Leaders with a desire to develop the third factor in others want to nourish and grow those around them. They believe in the potential of their charges long before the charges may believe in themselves. The challenge lies not in imparting technical or practical knowledge but in inspiring self-belief and a desire to own responsibility for improving the individual themselves. Great leaders want to help others to desire their own development. It’s about having what’s referred to as a developmental bias. Do you care to help others both find their where and help them dare to go there? If so, then you may have a developmental bias.
Jensen offers five characteristics of great leaders that contribute to developing the third factor in others. The principal characteristic of leaders with a developmental bias is self-awareness or self-management.
Great leaders are guides from the side, not sages from the stage. They seek to be Anteambulos. They work to Be a Zero and focus their energies not on self-aggrandizement but on development of others. Before they can help others, they must be able to control themselves. They know themselves so they can grow themselves so that they can give themselves.
Do you know yourself? If you’re a hyper-competitive stress monkey that loses their cool when facing frustration, this will trickle through to others and may be a negative influence of them under trying times. Leaders are both coaches and performers. Our performers have their job to do. They can only do their best when they aren’t being disrupted by your presence. The starting point is to not make things worse because of your idiosyncrasies. Are you building or releasing pressure? Have you asked others how your presence impacts others? Do you know your own personality traits and tendencies under pressure? Do you have weaknesses? What triggers your less than best behaviors? Is there a disconnect between the contribution you think you’re making and what others think? Can you present a poker face? Can you project calm? Can you provide assurance? How do you talk to yourself under pressure? Do you manage your thoughts, your language, your posture, and body language under difficult circumstances?
Do you know your beliefs? Do you know why you’re doing what you’re doing? What are your core values? What does being a coach/leader mean to you? A coach is a conduit to creating capabilities. A coach is an impetus to other’s improvement, an accelerator of other’s ambitions. What is your coaching/leadership philosophy? Do you have one? Do you operate with the mental clarity of coaching legends like the late John Wooden? Are your decisions driven by principles or situations? If you have multiple values, do you have a hierarchy of them? What are your beliefs about others? What do these say about what you value?
Do you act with intention? It boils down to awareness and intention. Be aware that your job is to care and help others dare. Understand that your emotions are contagious. Know for what you stand. Act with intention to do your part. You want to minimize your impact on others in a negative way so that you can devote your attention and energies to supporting their development. It’s not about you. All that we do should be viewed through the lens of the question, Does it serve?
Remember, crises (and pressure situations) don’t create character they reveal it. It’s our job to prepare ourselves to be our best when under a test. If it is important for you to make a positive contribution to others, what are you doing to prepare yourself to perform? Before we can help others, we must be able to manage ourselves. We must be present to be useful. Many of us know what we should be doing but in the moment aren’t able to execute because we’re caught up reacting to outside forces. None of this is easy. It implies ongoing effort.
Great leaders want to develop others. They are interested in others not for their own purposes but for the betterment of the individual. They take pride in being a positive part of another’s journey. A framework Jensen offers to see where people are on their development is a 2 x 2 grid with knowledge on the x axis and confidence on the y axis. We are either low or high in each. We can be low in knowledge and confidence. We can be low in knowledge and high in confidence. We can be high in knowledge yet low in confidence, and we can be high in both knowledge and confidence. The approach a leader would take to working with people in each of these categories would be different. Leaders like people watching and learning about what makes others tick. They like the challenge of getting inside the minds of others and helping. Which of these groups would be the hardest to develop? Which do you most connect with? How would you treat people in each of these groups differently? At its root, leadership is about people, not processes. It’s about personalities, not plays. Paper plans may be perfect, but people play the game. Leaders as coaches exhibit the care component we discussed in Chief Commonalities. Coaching leaders care enough to want what’s best for the individual. The paradox is that doing this well is best for the team and organization as well as for the individual. Preparing people precedes performances.
What have the best coaches, teachers, bosses in common? They help you see that you’re capable of more than you presently think you can do. Then they push you to deliver on what they see. They hold you to account. They set standards. They demand that you demand more from yourself. They don’t chastise or castigate, they challenge. They work to cultivate your personal commitment to your own development. They encourage the personal exploration of your own abilities. They ignite your third factor. Coaches want to work themselves out of a job. They don’t want you to be dependent on them. They want you to be capable of taking charge of your own day and working with independence and initiative.
Those that can have their third factor ignited tend to be happier in the workplace. With mental health issues being a large cause of work absence and staff turnover being an additional organizational issue, anything that heightens engagement and health of employees is worth considering. Jensen cites work done by Margaret Wheatley who wrote Leadership and the New Science. Wheatley studied the work effort of staff in dysfunctional organizations. Even where the environment was difficult, about a quarter of staff maintained motivation and worked hard. They had found a deeper purpose with which to connect their efforts than the struggling environment around them. They were driven by personal pride and self-respect. Wise leaders look to incorporate developing employees as a priority to keep them. A final reason to focus on developing one’s third factor is that training opportunities alone result in modest, if any, performance gains. However, training coupled with coaching almost doubles performance.
The prevalent view of HR as Human Resources reflects that people are material to be used up in service of an organization. Staff are cogs in the machine. They’re used for as long as they provide use and then replaced by new, fresh legs. The cynical concept of HR is to chew people up and spit them out. Embracing the idea of developing people’s third factor is seeing people as assets of a different kind. The goal here isn’t to deplete and discard but to build up and empower. In The Purpose Effect, Dan Pontefract writes, “Most companies use people to build their business. At Johnsonville, we use our business to build our people.” This seems to capture the core of the care component of leadership. It’s a development bias. People first, productivity and profitability follow.
